Leaving Berlin

by Britt Holmström

After the funeral, Mother’s Aunt Hilda moved to Regina to be close to her sister. Regina was way, way out west they said, in the province called Saskatchewan. It was all prairie out there. They pronounced the word “prairie” as if it was something substandard or contagious.

  Did they have the same sky on the prairie? Her mother said they did, but that it was way, way bigger on account of the flatness of the land.

  A day and a half later they’re back in Canada, back on the prairie where the sky is as omnipotent as ever. In Regina they stay at the West Harvest Inn, not bothering to bewilder Aunt Hilda with another visit. Hester is unable to check with Social Services about her because it’s Saturday. She says she’ll call them on Monday.

  The following day as they set out, Serena suggests they wait until she has to go to the bathroom before they stop to get gas. “It’ll save us a bit of time.”

  The timesaving aspect wins Hester over.

  They are just east of Indian Head when Serena confides that her bladder is about burst and that they better stop at that gas station over there. Hester fills up the car while Serena runs to the bathroom.

  “That was quick,” says Hester approvingly when Serena returns.

  “I pee like a pro. Did you pay for the gas?”

  “I’ll go do that now.”

  “Hey, want to get me a bottle of diet pop while you’re there? I’m dying of thirst.”

  Hester says she’ll be happy to.

  When Hester reaches the door to the gas station store, Serena slips out of the passenger seat and hurries to the back of the car, opens the trunk and lifts out Hester’s strategically placed bags, puts them neatly side by side on the tarmac before nipping around to the driver’s side. She slides in, buckles up and turns the key in the ignition.

  Hester must have heard the car start, watched it roll forward, not comprehending, for there she comes, careening out of the store. Serena hears her scream, “What are you doing?” as the car hits the highway and shoots off in the direction they just came from, sees her wave her arms at the runaway vehicle, screaming louder and louder. In her pale face, incomprehension is growing in tandem with her fear.

  Ignoring her sister — though far from oblivious to her — Serena switches the radio to a music station serving golden oldies. Mungo Jerry! She cranks up the volume. In the summertime when the weather is high, you can stretch right up and touch the sky. Snorting with laughter, she steps on the gas until she far exceeds the speed limit. There’s not a lot of traffic on the prairie. She drives faster still, switching on the air conditioning to High. Cold air blasts into the hot car. She can feel the sweat on her forehead dry.

  Hester’s runaway Honda shoots west while in its back mirror Hester herself grows smaller and smaller until all that’s left of her is a thin exclamation mark on a receding horizon.

  Ahead the road stretches and stretches far into the distant future, ruler straight beneath a sky so infinite Serena is convinced she can accelerate right into it if she tries hard enough. She presses the gas pedal all the way to the floor.

  THE REBEL DOLL

  * * *

  JOAN IS TIRED AND CRANKY. It’s been a long and tedious journey. Her clothes smell of jet fuel. Now she worries that her sister has forgotten that this is the day she arrives from Canada for an overdue visit. Everybody in the immediate family has travelled to England to visit Abigail but Joan. Then again, Joan is busier than any of them.

  Now here she sits. The bench is hard, its wood worn and slippery, not compatible with her bony butt. She keeps shifting her legs, scissoring her right over her left, left over right, conscious of the fact that crossing one’s legs is disastrous not only for the body’s natural alignment, but leads to varicose veins and blood clots and God knows what. No doubt it’s disastrous for spiritual enlightenment as well.

  Abigail was supposed to be waiting when the 2.19 train pulled in (at 2.36), arms flung open in welcoming embrace, but she wasn’t there. There wasn’t a soul on the narrow stretch of platform that makes up the quaint end of the line of this small branch railway. Joan, having had the foresight to get some English change, headed straight for the waiting room to find a public phone. There was no phone. She strode up to the old man behind the ticket counter to ask why.

  “There’s a call box across the street, dear.” The man pointed across the street to a red phone booth.

  There’s an old-fashioned black phone sitting by his right elbow. Joan points to it. “Do you mind if I use it?”

  “Sorry, madam, no customers allowed inside this area.”

  “Listen, I’m a crown attorney in . . . ”

  “Be that as it may, dear.” The old man stirs a spoonful of sugar into his mug of tea.

  Stunned by the man’s indifference, Joan, at a loss, concedes defeat. “Can I at least leave my suitcase here while I go to call?”

  “By all means,” says the man, stirring his tea as if it was a pleasure to do so.

  There is no answer at Abigail’s house. Hopefully this means she is on her way. If not, Joan will be royally pissed off.

  There is, of course, another scenario: something has happened. Abigail being Abigail, it is entirely possible.

  Joan returns to the train station. The old man ignores her.

  It’s a muggy July afternoon. The waiting room is dead quiet. Apart from Joan there is only the old man half dozing behind the safety glass of his ticket office, his mug apparently empty already. Joan wouldn’t mind a cup of tea. Or coffee. Something to wake her up.

  She is about to slide into jet-lagged slumber, when the door to the platform flings open. A man strides in. He does so as if entering a stage, a not very good actor, too self-conscious and stiff, but eager to perform, craving the spotlight. Though he does not utter a word, there is something decidedly noisy and invasive about his sudden presence.

  Joan straightens up at the sight of him. Maybe Abigail sent him to fetch her.

  A second look tells her this is not the case.

  The man’s acute self-awareness renders his movements graceless. His white holiday hat, meant to be dashing, perches at an odd angle. It looks as if it resents being stuck on this particular head and is determined not to cooperate.

  If hats could make wishes, reflects Joan, this one would wish it was angled on a more compatible noggin. The hat looks so new she is surprised not to see a price tag dangling from its brim. The man’s jeans and white sneakers are also brand new. So is his shirt. She can tell by the sharp creases that it was until very recently folded into a neat rectangle.

  This stranger with his slightly bulging blue eyes, moist fattish lips and pompous expression, is no friend of Abigail’s.

  Joan takes a fervent dislike to the man. It’s not the first time she suffers an irrational reaction to a complete stranger.

  (Her husband finds her behaviour disturbing. Abnormal. “Joan has issues and, trust me, that is putting it mildly,” he has revealed to his colleague, Fiona, to whom he has grown very close over the past two years.)

  Joan interprets her own behaviour as insightful and intuitive. Looking at the man before her, she deems it fair to conclude that the person he now assumes himself to be did not exist when he bounced out of bed this morning. Only when he stepped into these brand new togs did his new self — his holiday self — emerge, looking pleased, the hat a bit iffy, but everything in its proper place.

  Now here he is. “Pompous Twit on Holiday” is the title she arrives at. It’s this insight of hers that inspires the creation of amusing titles, that and her keen ability to analyze people and situations. Her title for this man, while not hugely original, is thoroughly fitting.

  Did the man request that his wife, assuming he has one (and something tells Joan that he does), purchase these holiday garments for him? Did he hand her an itemized list of his precise requirements? Saying, “And please note, dear, that the shirt must have very, very thin stripes, preferably a discreet blue, and be of the finest quality cotton.”

  Or did he undertake
the task himself, trusting only his own immaculate taste?

  Yes. A second glance tells Joan that he did just that. He was off to the shops, as they say over here, probably after work one evening, having consulted a Men’s Fashion magazine, a Sunday paper colour supplement catering to the upwardly striving. Afterwards he took a later train from the city, carrying his bags in a manner that prominently displayed the names of the upmarket shops where he had purchased his clothes as though shopping in these places had long been his habit.

  How can Joan, newly arrived in the country, presume to know all this?

  Because it’s obvious. Her first impressions are seldom wrong. It’s a talent she takes pride in. She is well known in legal circles in Canada, the fearsome Joan Deacon, crown attorney, she of the tailored two-piece suits and cold silver jewelry. Deciphering people is her business and, by God, she’s good at it.

  As she points out to friends and colleagues when the subject comes up, deciphering people is not half as complicated as it sounds. It does not require great insight into the complexities of the human psyche. Most people are easier to read than a mass-produced paperback with a pre-fab plot. People may be devious, but ninety-nine percent of the time they are devious in the same predictable manner.

  Thus a quick read of the new arrival informs her that here is a pompous fool as supported by the evidence in a standard dictionary: Pompous: pretentious, as in speech or manner; self-important. Fool: a person with little or no judgment, common sense, insight etc. That’s easy enough. Why he has decided to reinvent himself at this point in time, unless it is a regular quirk of his, she can only speculate on, and so she does, for no other reason that it amuses her, and because she has time to kill. It stops her from having to worry about Abigail.

  The waiting room in the small railway station somewhere in the northwest of England is an insignificant relation of the vast crowded cavern of London’s Euston station where Joan caught the train to Manchester earlier that morning, having arrived from Gatwick on a train crowded with overseas travellers with bad transatlantic breath.

  She arrived at her final destination on the nearly empty two-carriage toy train that trundles up a modest branch line from Manchester twice a day. Where, expecting to find her sister, she found nobody at all.

  The small town of Bendlesfield is the end of the line. The train could not make it any farther should it want to make a run for it. Twenty feet from the station the rails ends at a brick wall that once was the opening of a tunnel. Trailing down the brick wall are green rivulets of ivy and climbing up from between the rails to meet them, a tangle of wild roses. Beyond the ex-tunnel, green hills billow in the summer haze.

  Five years ago, Joan’s sister Abigail, unexpectedly widowed at a young age, surprised everybody by getting married again. Her new husband was an Englishman named Ian Burke, a cheerful, burly man born and bred in these faraway parts. They met when Abigail was on a week’s holiday in London. The enforced trip was a birthday present from her parents, two brothers and sister. They hoped a change of scenery would help her forget the recent tragedy.

  It was her first holiday since Wallace, her husband, died in a car crash on a wintry Calgary thoroughfare. He had been driving home drunk from an office Christmas party — straight into a sixteen-wheeler coming from the opposite direction — after having promised Abigail that morning, cross his heart and hope to die, that this time he would for sure stay sober, and what’s the matter, Abby, you don’t believe me?

  Less than a year after they first met, Abigail and Ian settled staidly, contentedly, on the farm half a mile north of Bendlesfield. Ian had recently inherited the falling down barn, the two-storey limestone house, and a suitable number of acres from his grandfather. They grow their own vegetables, but do not actually farm. Ian is the co-owner of The Toad and Jockstrap, a pub on the outskirts of town — village really, together with his grown-up son Ned from a previous marriage. The pub keeps him busy, especially in the summer when thirsty hikers crisscross the countryside on the network of public footpaths. He works full time, pouring lager and ale and serving ploughman’s lunches and steak and kidney pies (made by Abigail) to save money on staff.

  And — he has sworn to Abigail — he always walks back home along the winding country lane if he has had a pint or two.

  Abigail has found a worthwhile brand of felicity in this most unexpected of places. She has recently had modest success as a writer of cookbooks: the Abby’s Country Kitchen series. A new one is due out in the fall.

  Joan has not seen her sister for more than three years and is impatient for her to show up and reveal if, and how, life in the English boondocks has changed her. She worries that Abigail might have acquired odd habits, common in these parts. Forgetting how to tell time or something. Joan, a big-city woman, finds rural areas picturesque enough for short visits, but would not actually want to waste her life in one.

  She checks her watch. Abigail’s lack of punctuality has not changed.

  A minute after the man has entered the waiting room, the door to the platform opens again — unobtrusively this time — and a woman and three young girls timidly file in. The man does not hurry over to hold open the door for them, though it’s clear that they are his wife and daughters.

  Joan’s first impression is: what a long-suffering quartet! It’s the rigidity of their upper lips that give them away. That and their uniform posture: shoulders hunched in a desire not to be noticed. The look in their eyes is evasive as if to prevent the world from detecting any subversive thoughts that well-brought-up people are loath to acknowledge ownership of, but that sometimes, if you’re not careful, shine through.

  The quartet reveals no visible trace of excitement over the start of their holiday.

  It’s Joan’s opinion that the English middle class has a greater flair for polite long-suffering than anybody else on the planet. Either it’s in their blood, a mutant gene expressing itself in that Mustn’t-Make-a-Fuss attitude they’re so damn proud of, or they enroll in obligatory government sponsored classes to perfect it, perhaps some kind of middle class finishing school. Abigail, given to loud and immediate complaining when displeased, has written lengthy e-mails to Joan about the unreasonableness of this odd phenomenon, confessing that she will never comprehend, nor does she wish to, the reasons for such self-inflicted limitations.

  It’s with great interest that Joan observes the phenomenon in these specimens in their natural habitat.

  The wife and three daughters are nicely dressed, but their clothes are not new. Their plain cotton dresses are freshly laundered and ironed (a good mother sees to that), but they are far from the latest fashion. People sporting brand new clothes tend to walk in a manner self-conscious and expectant, tense from a secret wish to be complimented, especially if the clothes are more expensive than they can normally afford.

  The female members of this family are entirely without expectations.

  If they were on the same train as Joan they must have sat in the other carriage. If not, where did they pop up from? There has been no other train. Have they been standing out on the platform until now? And if so, why?

  The wife is toting a bulging straw bag. The eldest girl, not more than ten years old, carries a tennis racket in each hand, awkwardly as if unsure what such implements are for. The middle one, a few years younger, drags a skipping rope like a leash with the dog missing. The youngest is clutching a smugly grinning doll that breaks drastically with family tradition by flaunting the gaudiest get-up imaginable. The cheap synthetic material — the shiny kind that never wrinkles — is bright orange splashed with purple and green polka dots. The sleeves are wide with purple flounces. Pink and green beads rattle and clang around the doll’s neck. The grinning lips are a violent red. It’s a naughty grin. The doll resembles a small vampire recently arrived from New Orleans, having celebrated Mardi Gras by feasting on fresh blood. From the hem of the dress dangle two thin legs ending in a pair of oversized blue shoes.

  When the door has c
losed behind the quartet, the man issues a command, a sudden nasal honk. Their attention to it is automatic. Without a word they march over to the long bench facing the street and sit down, one after the other in a choppy wave.

  The bench is at right angles to the one where Joan is sitting. The twit parks himself closest to her. The youngest child sits at the far end. From the doll comes a clatter of beads that sounds like an unrepressed giggle. When it stops, the room once again succumbs to silence.

  There they sit, saying nothing, doing nothing. Perhaps this is how they spend their holidays, sitting in waiting rooms at train stations raising questions in the heads of strangers, staring out windows, down at smooth stone floors, up at ceilings, never uttering a word.

  It rained earlier in the day and the room is damp, exuding a stuffy smell of mould. A determined fly buzzes frenziedly in one of the two windows, demonstrating how one ought to frolic now the sun is shining. After a while the buzz inspires the eldest girl to start fiddling with her tennis rackets, thudding them rhythmically against her feet.

  Unexpectedly the fool springs to life. “I’d better call the office,” he declares to the room at large.

  Nobody responds to the announcement. Joan is the only one to show an interest as he hauls out a mobile phone and proceeds to dial.

  The fool — like most of the world’s mobile babblers — has nothing of interest to impart but is driven by the need to communicate all the same, louder than necessary, if only to confirm his existence.

  “Vanessa? Derek here. How are things at the office? Oh, good. Listen, I thought I better leave you my holiday number. Our cottage has a phone, you see. So . . . I thought . . . you know, just in case . . . Have you got a pen?”

  It’s a bad habit of Joan Deacon’s, this fixation on complete strangers. In her defense, it has always been a harmless compulsion.

  The objects of her present fixation take no notice of her. There is no reason why they should. She is a middle-aged woman sitting alone in the waiting room of an insignificant railway station in the middle of nowhere, a suitcase at her feet, a deceivingly plain purse on the bench beside her. She is comfortably, but not elegantly dressed, looking somewhat disheveled — the result of having spent the night on a transatlantic flight. She has stowed her impressive assortment of rings, including her wedding band, in her purse. Her fingers tend to swell up when she travels by air.